Title: Waiki-zak
Artist: Noggin
Album: Buzz Exports
Date: 2004
This one screams summer of 04 to me. Believe it or not, this actually grew out of a scratch session with one of those many dollar-bin Hawaiian records. The scratch/samples are long gone, but as is not uncommon, the song took on a life of its own.
Download: waiki-zak (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: loopsku
Artist: Noggin
Album: Classic Trash
Date: 2000
Honestly don’t remember much about this song production with a few exceptions:
1) it was originally a completely different song – sort of a remix you could say
2) i had my headphones on, moved some sliders, arranged some patterns, hit play, and then just kind of zoned out for damn near an hour because this song seemed to materialise itself, vs being ‘written’.
This is the sound of Jeskola Buzz.
Download: loopsku (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: I Swear to you my friend it will be alright
Artist: Noggin
Album: As Yet Unknown
Date: 2005
This one comes up today because it has vocals from my own dad, El Medico / Dirty Knife. So happy Father’s day. He will probably dislike this song because he is not a fan of “rap music”. Well, I’m sorry pops, but if you can label anything a bit more adventurous than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir as “rap music”, then yea, we’ve got a long way to go.
I wrote this song for a very good friend of mine who was just having a bit of an existential crisis. I can’t remember the details but it’s likely because the details don’t matter, it was the overall feeling I was concerned with at the time, and I hope that my feeble attempt to lend a hand through resonances is remembered for nothing more than the crux feeling it was expressing. For as terrible as the internet can be, the ability to collaborate musically with each other, he in San Marcos, me in Praha, was really a blessing.
Here’s to new fathers.
Download: noggin – i swear to you my friend it will all be alright (demo) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: What You Get
Artist: Mr. Sprott ft. Noggin
Album: As Yet Unknown
Date: 2011
Another pretty instant jam…recorded once again with KSwens. This is his Nord patch + idea, I just helped put it to tape….literally, this recording is off of the cassette bounce-deck I keep running pretty much 24/7.
Lots of experimental panning techniques happening here…if you can watch this one through a goniometer it makes a very pretty show.
Download: whatuget (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Bulldog
Artist: Noggin
Album: Buzz Exports
Date: 2002
Inspiration found in the strangest places. I named this one ‘bulldog’ after a distortion I was using, ‘pampurfe’ or something like that, a buzz machine whose skin is a smiling ass bulldog. Anyway, my boy Keith is in town and he loves the bulldogs so this one is inspired by Moose.
Real old skoo1 tracker feel here.
Download: bulldog2 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Wax
Artist: Noggin
Album: As Yet Unknown
Date: 2003
What’s funny about this track is that it really had the most proliferation as a startup sound. Sounds really good, that first sequence right when yer OS boots up.
This is the most complete track I’ve ever made in Fruity Loops (I’ve only ever tried that program way before it was ‘FL Studio’ and even then only about 3 times), and I gotta say it was really just based on inspiration from that main synth sound (beautiful tone…what the hell is that?).
Download: noggin – wax (democlip) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Incongruent Sequence (1st take)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Divergent AI (demo)
Date: 2003
This was a pretty fair-share Buzz / Reason hybrid. Most sounds generated in Reason then sequenced within the Buzz tracker environment. A lot of granular synthesis going on at the lower levels here. Hope you enjoy your glitchy sunday track.
Download: Noggin – Incongruent Sequence (first take) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Girls Like Me Because I Write Songs About Corndogs
Artist: Noggin
Album: As Yet Unknown
Date: 2005
Posting this one because I know that I wrote it entirely on this date in 2005. This is combination live drum synth with the ER-1, absolute amen mayhem with buzz, and custom scratching with a final scratch record controlling some candidly recorded audio files via dj decks. Car on the vocals.
Download: Noggin – corndogs (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Midnight Fog
Artist: Noggin
Album: Buzz Exports
Release Date: 1998
Request (keep em coming…even if it’s just an idea or a feeling you want to request). Not that it really matters, but this could potentially be a 97 instead of a 98. Thanks to Ilya for reminding me that I was considering including this on ‘Phase’ but opted for ‘From Perspective’ instead (is that really real or are you making that up?).
I wrote this song one night after driving with Jon etc through the country to his house or some land or some other country place. Fog in this part of Texas is really weird when it manifests, really thick and patchy. This particular night, it just started springing up in the valleys out towards the creek bottom. Real thick stuff…we were turning on the brights and driving blind with the fog glowing back at us just to be stupid kids. So this track is all about driving a big blue oldsmobile up and down the hills, rolling in and out of thick patches of fog. Gangster.
Download: midnight-fog (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Heptadecimal ER1
Artist: Cooper and Spratt
Album: Listening Room
Release Date: 2008
(this one is long and I have to leave, so once again, the upload will be completed later tonight once it is done)(EDIT: It’s live now)
A tribute to Tsutomu Katoh, founder of the Korg corporation. Korg has made some really great synthesizers in their day, and, via the second hand market, I’ve come to work with a couple. First was an original ER-1 drum synth I picked up in Eastern Europe from my DJ partner. This is a really great synthesizer, geared for rhythm and drum lines. However, when it’s your ONLY synth, you can start taking it into territory other than clicky drums (clicky describes the overall character, but that bass drum is phenomenal).
One trick I got really into was using the audio ins to process other gear via a send. It didn’t take long before I started processing itself within itself, for some wicked, wild feedback loops. There have been open mics I’ve played with just this machine and a patch cable patched from one output back to the audio in. For drones, it really excels if you can manage to tame it.
This is a piece Kyle and I recorded early summer in Palo Alto, CA, using nothing but that one piece of gear and a cheap mixer. It almost feels like all the digital knowledge we had gained in such a frantic, short period of time, just came exploding out in one 45 minute speaker rape. We never intended to do this piece, much less record it, but once we got into the Hexagon, it wasn’t hard to get the ‘tapes’ rolling. This is largely untouched, minus a small section at the beginning where the gain pot started scratching. I don’t remember much talking between us during the practice, but communication definitely was going on as we both tweaked minor changes that would explode into much larger sonic metamorphosis.
It’s long, noisy, and droney, and loud enough, it will get the cops called.
Download: Cooper And Spratt – 00 – Heptadecimal ER1 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
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